Sweeping the board: how dominant are the elite jumps trainers and jockeys?

It was one of the most spectacular displays of dominance the sport had ever seen. At this year's Cheltenham Festival, the pinnacle of the jumps season and the most competitive meeting in the calendar, two trainers swept all before them in a bravura demonstration of superpower status.

Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott between them won 15 of the 28 Cheltenham Festival races, turning the traditional British-Irish rivalry into a two-versus-the-world situation. A month and a half later and back on home soil, the two Irish trainers brought their trainers' title rivalry to a titanic conclusion at the Punchestown festival, winning more than half the races between them.

It was an astonishing example of racing superiority but it drew more rueful shakes of the head from out-gunned rivals than shock that a tiny elite could dominate to such an extent. As such, it laid bare the extent to which racing has come to accept an elite group of trainers – and, to a slightly lesser extent, jockeys – will dominate the game, both on the Flat and over jumps.